I was able to create a set of unique fitouts for my squad of NPCs (thanks to the help of the excellent directions in the Forum), and was able to have them pick up a good deal of gear (helmets, armor, weapons, and so on) with no trouble at all. This was using a uniquely named fitout for each NPC, of course, each fitout based on their individual names.

I recently wanted to add some new gear to these NPCs, so I modified their fitouts. But when I tried to have them pick up the gear on the square they were on, I got the following message:

So, I thought maybe they needed to have the tags removed and reapplied, which I did, but no luck.

I then brought them singly into my Party, and tried again, but no luck.

Then, I deleted all the fitouts, and created brand new ones, while assigning just the gear I wanted them to pick up. I had them drop their old gear (which they did just fine), but when I tasked them to pick up the new gear, again, that same error message.

What do I need to do differently?

As an aside, I noticed that the rules on Scanning suggest that NPCs should be able to see as far on the ground as a PC, based on their Perception skill:

“Characters, NPCs, Droids: Perception Skill + 1”

(from http://www.swcombine.com/rules/?Scanning)

Do the NPCs need to be equipped with one of the three scanner types, and you the PC need to also have a scanning pack as well, in order to see what they see?

Yes to the scanner question, as to the fitouts, it sounds like a bug, would help if you tried to equip them one by one and see which NPC is causing the problem, and give their ID so an asim can look into it.

Finally made it back to my squad. And sure enough, by taking them off the surface of the planet, and into my ship, all the fitouts worked just fine.

The error must be in trying to use the fitouts on the surface.

Oh -- you'll like this one. When trying to create one more fitout, I tried to double click a weapon and add it to the primary slot, then did it again before anything had appeared. I got this wonderful little message:

I don't know of a way to build from inside a ship. But after switching multiple things up over the course of however long this took the bug finally evaporated today. Though I don't think I did anything different.